Living at the Sunrise

by forumholitorium

Funny how quickly I find myself addicted to watching the sun rise. The interplay of colors and clouds is never the same, will never repeat itself. Since no photograph will ever do it justice, it’s best to get up in time and experience it through your own eyes. My favorite this week started with an introduction that included all the colors of the rainbow.

It’s also funny how often I resolve to do something I enjoy involving a reasonable investment of time and resources and then find myself doing something completely different. Despite getting off to a good start reading Don Quixote and making a thin scarf, I channeled my energy this week into knitting a bunch of small projects to use up a motley assortment of leftover balls of yarn and finishing Time and Tide in Acadia. It’s the sunrise that distracted me, you see. Look at the colors of the felted bowls and especially the salmon entrelac squares on the zippered bag.

The book touched upon sunrises too. A passionate observer of the landscape and wildlife on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine, author Christopher Camuto practices “being indigenous,” as he puts it, walking its trails, exploring its shoreline by kayak and canoe, noting its rich variety of birds and animals, trying to appreciate “the eventfulness of every step you take.” The island was first inhabited by the Abenaki, whose name means “those living at the sunrise.” From the way he writes about his relationship to the island, I can’t imagine that Camuto feels any less connected to the place than its original population did. You do not need to be born in a specific location to become native to it. And you may be born and live in a place where you never feel like a native. And you can live in a place for many years and never feel native. And you can yearn to return to a place where you feel native. The world offers you many options.

The last chapter starts out with the sentence, “We travel to islands to be partly at sea.” It dawned on me that most of the places I would like to visit are islands. Perhaps the cotton bag above will accompany me to an island this summer.